Time Warner Cable is not my friend. And if you’re a consumer, no cable company is really looking out for you. Between rising costs and shoddy customer support (not to mention that business practices from all local cable providers make one consider of a word: monopoly), most of us want to steer clear of them, but can’t.

If we could get our TV without them, we would (and would also save a good chunk of change every month). But, dang it, there’s a horrible kind of dependency at work here.

We need the cable company to provide us with the nectar of entertainment. A hit of a sitcom. A little bit from a documentary, or a news broadcast.

America is a television nation, rightly or wrongly, and cable companies are the pushers — they’ve ruled the streets.

Until, possibly, now.

First, there was Netflix adding streaming capability to the Xbox, PS3 and Wii. That, in and of itself, is awesome, and was enough to tempt me to cancel my cable service.

But Netflix only allows you to stream from its DVD collection — which itself is a small percentage of their full movie stock (vast though it may seem).

What are we supposed to do if we want to watch episodes of our favorite shows as they come out, rather than waiting for the DVD to become available on Netflix? What if we just need to watch The Daily Show, or Justified and don’t want to hover over our computer to do so?

PlayOn essentially turns your computer into a media server, allowing you to stream anything from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Comedy Central, Adult Swim (among many others — the World Cup is even available now) direct to your television.

$40 gets you the software, which you have to download to your PC (it’s $20 per year after that. A quick bit of math will show that your cable provider wants at least $600 per year for the same (or less)). Turn on the PlayOn server and fill out your login information for whatever sites you’re a member of (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc). Then turn on your Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3 and navigate to PlayOn. Then watch. That’s it.

You can also use PlayOn to access video files already on your harddrive. It’s stunningly handy.

The PlayOn screen seen of the Wii (
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The only limit to the quality of the stream itself is your computer. If your PC (or internet speed — thank you again cable companies) is lagging, than the picture will also lag.

One big bummer about the software is the menu interface, at least on the Xbox and PS3 — it really just replicates a file folder format. And as such, requires quite a lot of clicking and browsing.

On the other hand, an unattractive file browser that allows me access to the TV I actually want to watch is far and away more attractive than a cable company that wants $50 per month for garbage I don’t want to see.